Letters - 16 June 2023
From Citizenship to Non-resistance
Citizenship
Steven Burkeman (26 May) almost writes my story.
I too – having been denied German citizenship at birth, because we were sort-of Jewish – applied to have it restored. It took a long time, with a lot of frustration, but I finally succeeded, and I felt grateful to the very kind young woman who steered us through the labyrinth.
Now I have two passports – a British one and a German one. Other members of the family have done the same, as I describe in my book How to be a Refugee.
As for Brexit – the stupidity of that beggars description.
Irene Gill
Virginia Woolf
I was interested in the Virginia Woolf article (26 May). My great-great-grandfather’s cousin, Hannah Whitall Smith, quoted in Quaker faith & practice 21.48 and prolific Quaker author, had to raise her granddaughters in England after her daughter Mary ran away to Italy with the Jewish art dealer Bernard Berenson and moved into the Villa Il Tati in Florence. It was a scandal in my Quaker family.
Her granddaughter Karin married Adrian Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s younger brother.
Apparently Virginia Woolf thought her Quaker-raised sister-in-law and her Quaker relatives to be quite boring.
Except perhaps, indirectly, in the 1903 excerpt in Quaker faith & practice 21.48: ‘I find (growing older) even more delightful than I thought. It is so delicious to be done with things and to feel no need any longer to concern myself about earthly affairs…’
According to Wikipedia, Hannah’s gay son, Logan, was in part the basis for the character Nicholas Greene in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which I have never read.
David Hickok
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